Poverty

Previously, I wrote about a 1967 job guarantee proposal put forward by the President's National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty. As that was a fairly popular post, I figured I should share another old 1960s government proposal, this time a proposal for a universal basic income (UBI).
In...

When the Census released its latest poverty data in September, I had lots of plans for it. For the most part, those plans got derailed by my basic income modeling project and my efforts to get the conclusions of that project into a bigger publication. Here I take up one of the projects I abandoned...

Matt Bruenig posted an interesting response to Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant The Atlantic essay on what poverty is really like. In the essay she argues that there has been a palpable shift in how we as a society conceive of poverty. Where we once felt empathy, we now feel anger. Bruenig correctly...

Ron Haskins, whom the Brookings Institution confusingly lists as an expert, has a piece over there from earlier this week titled The War On Poverty: What Went Wrong? The piece is so statistically incoherent that it is really hard to understand why he is given any such platform to begin...

The establishment consensus is accurately summarized by Martin Feldstein, “Preventing an explosion of the national debt requires slowing the growth of the benefits of middle-class retirees.” But the truth is that the middle class and poor need more help than ever.
David Callahan has written here at...

I’ve just finished Sasha Abramsky’s The American Way of Poverty, which bills itself as the successor to Michael Harrington’s The Other America. Like Harrington, Abramsky provides a snapshot of poverty in America and insists that something must be done to reduce if not eliminate it. The...

In its annual poverty report, the Census includes a table that few take note of which actually details by how much families are below the poverty line. In 2012, the number was $175.3 billion, 1% of GDP. That is how many dollars it would take to bring every person in the U.S. up to the poverty line...

Last week, the Census put out its annual income and poverty figures for 2012. The big news on the poverty front is that the percentage of Americans living in poverty is unchanged at 15 percent, which amounts to 46.5 million Americans. More than 1 in 5 kids under the age of 18 are in poverty...

In the wake of the House Republicans 217 to 210 decision to cut food stamps it's worth revisiting how the 2000s were a lost decade for the poor.
From the Census numbers released this week:
Food stamps were one of the few brights spots in a frayed social safety net. In 2012, one in five...

Washington's set to go from not doing enough to actively adding to our unconscionable poverty rate, slashing food stamps as poverty languishes.
That's because the House Republicans have a plan to double-down in their cuts to the Supplemental Assistance for Needy Families (SNAP), commonly known as...